Seeing You in a New Light
by Ze Dolphinator
Summary: When the zoo accidentally transfers two aquatic animals, they begin to see view other differently under the California sun. Completely Skilene. Rating is subject to change.
1. Alone

To this day, neither mammal nor bird understood just what happened that fateful night. Hidden under the cover of nightfall, a hand lifted both animals from their habitats. A stuffy, wooden crate was their only sanctuary from the outside world.

Dusk had lifted from the sleepy world before Skipper woke from his slumber, only to see a few dabbles of sunlight here and there. "Kowalski, analysis."

Sheer silence.

"Kowalski?"

Panic began to set in as Skipper realized he was alone. As he began to think he may never get out, or possibly that the Danes had finally caught him, a snore came out of nowhere. Instinctively, he yelled, setting off a chain reaction. A sleeping Marlene woke up in mid-snore.

After a moment of silence, she murmured, "Where am I?"

"…Marlene?"

As realization that she was not alone hit her, she stood up, trying to find the source of the voice.

"I'm over here."

Her paws touched feathers, still somewhat damp, clearly from last night's lap training. "Skipper?"

"That's affirmative."

Another awkward silence was created as Marlene hastily removed her paw and let it hang by her side. Finally she broke the silence. "Where are we?"

"Alone."

"I figured that out." she replied tartly.

"_Mommy? Daddy?"_

"_Mommy, where are you? I can't see anything."_

"_Am I dead?"_

Marlene shook her head, trying to remove the memory of being transferred out of her head, when it hit her. "That's it!"

"What?"

"We're being shipped to another zoo! And with every crate comes a shipping label. We can figure out where we are!" she said excitedly, trying to spot the label.

"Don't you kinda have to…read?"

"Don't underestimate me. I can recognize some words."

"You can read?" Skipper repeated.

"California taught me things." she said as she spotted the label. "California…"

An impatient Skipper huffily muttered, "Could you hurry up? Just tell me where we're going!"

"California!" Marlene screamed. "We're going to California!"


	2. Differences

Although they had slept through the majority of the ride, the flight felt like an eternity repeated three times over. Combined with Marlene's reminiscing of California beaches and Skipper's panic of how the team will maintain order without him, they could barely hear themselves think.

"You know, not everyone is completely psyched about going to the West Coast." Skipper said tartly.

"I know." was Marlene's cool reply, followed by more thoughts of the California zoo.

As soon as the box was opened, Skipper jumped out and kicked the handler in the face, followed by jumping over his shoulder and knocking him out. "Now we need to go back to The Big Apple." he said, making his way back to the airport.

"Whoa, whoa." Marlene said, grabbing him before he ran too far away. "We can't go through California without a care in the world, like tourists . We're animals, for Pete's sake! We'd get tranquilized and set back to the wild."

Skipper shivered as he recalled his short trip to Antarctica. "Well, then we'll need a hiding spot."

"Uh, the zoo?"

"Good plan."

Marlene rolled her eyes as Skipper began tobogganing towards a pier. "Other way." she said flatly, pointing to the opposite direction.

Once they had snuck in, hidden as a school group's plush animals, Marlene quickly pointed the way to the aquatic exhibit. She dove into the otter pool and felt at home for the first time in a while. But something was missing. Whatever it was, she shook it off and began relaxing, pleased to be home under her California sun. All her old friends greeted her, and they began to feel like family once again.

Skipper, however, wasn't so lucky. He had never met any of the penguins in his life before, and he carefully examined each one to make sure none of them were spies. That ritual earned him a bunch of weird looks, followed by a "beat it, loser" comment.

Hurt and confused, Skipper tried to do the smile-and-wave routine, but apparently that wasn't what real penguins do. Finally he decided to let go of his inner fears and go over to the otter habitat for some advice.


	3. Pretenders

When Skipper arrived at the otter pool, he found Marlene around a set of other otters. One of them made a "look behind you" gesture, and she spun around to see Skipper standing there.

"Skipper, my sisters, Mackenzie, Madeline, Maize, Megan, and Martha. Mackenzie, Madeline, Maize, Megan, and Martha, this is Skipper." She said, hastily introducing her sisters to the penguin.

"Is he your boyyyy-friend?" one of them cooed, sending the others into a fit of giggles. Skipper began to reject the claim, saying, "Well, more accurately…" but that managed to get him an elbow in the gut. "Let me handle this" Marlene hissed in a low voice before saying in an accent the New Yorkers had never heard before, "He is, like, totally the best, like, boyfriend you could ever have, you know?"

"What was that?" Skipper muttered. That earned him another elbow. "I said, lemme handle this." Marlene said in a hushed growl.

"And, like, how long have you been dating?" one of the otters, maybe Maize asked.

"A year" and "Two months" were the two replies that escaped their lips. Marlene quickly excused them, and they walked over to a corner. "Are you deaf? I specifically told you to leave this to me!" She noticed his hurt expression, something you typically wouldn't come close to seeing on Skipper, and she quickly calmed down. "Now, what did you come here for?"

Skipper sighed before explaining, "Well, according to you, California is the best place in the world, but I'm clearly not having the time of my life." Marlene took a deep breath before she said, "Me neither."

"What?"

"Well, the California I knew was a California for a little otter. But now I'm an adult, and the place isn't the same at all. Although, Southern California is a great place to go. I can take you there, if you want." she suggested.

Skipper considered her offer seriously before he said, "You mean, like Hollywood, and LA, and…"

"That's the place."

"Why don't we, then?"

They ran towards the direction of the airport, trying frantically to sneak onto the next flight to LA.


	4. Welcome to LA

"So this is LA." Skipper said, awestruck at the bustle of the city and how it was so very different than New York.

"Mm-hmm" was Marlene's reply, the same dumbstruck expression on her face. Skipper turned to ask her a question when he registered Marlene's expression. "Never been here before?"

"Nope."

"But I thought you said it was an enchanting place…?" he inquired.

"From what I'd heard."

"Oh."

She then said, "And we might have to pretend to be a couple like in the aquarium." Skipper protested saying that if a crowd came over to them like in the aquarium every time they were spotted, they'd never get anywhere. But Marlene just replied, "Trust me on this one."

After about fifteen minutes, Skipper managed to say, "So what, we're just going to walk around like tourists and gape at a bunch of buildings?"

"You got a better idea on how to blend in?"

"Nope, but I've got an idea on how to have fun." he replied, a mischievous glint in his eye. With that, he grabbed her paw and a map simultaneously and they ran to the direction of Venice Beach.

They'd made it halfway there before Marlene collapsed, panting. "I...can't go...any further!"

"Food."

"I'm up!" she said, her energy coming back so swiftly it was as if she had just had her blood replaced with coffee, when she realized something. "What's there to eat here? All they sell are ice cream, cotton candy, corn dogs..."

"Corn dogs." Skipper said decisively, grabbing her paw and running forward again.

"Corn dogs?" Marlene raised an eyebrow suspiciously. "What, so we go up a vendor and just say, 'Oh hello, we're the latest zoo escapees and we just traveled from the North to South end of California and we're hungry and we want corn dogs except we have no money so just give us all your corn dogs?'"

"Typically that would work nicely, but Kowalski's Humanifier 3000 is down so we're going with Plan B." Skipper replied.

"And is Plan B, uh, I don't know, VIOLENT in any way?" she began to ask before she turned around to see Skipper had already slapped everyone unconsious and had grabbed two corn dogs for them. That was the first time she noticed his perfect eyes.

They were a stunning shade of blue, the color of a stormy night sky as the clouds are fading away, like sparkling diamonds...

"Marlene! Do you want a corn dog or not?"

With a slight twitch, she came back to reality, her face turning beet red as she discovered what had happened. She took the corn dog without a word, dug a semi-small hole in the sand, and gestured him to come in it.

"A hole?" Skipper asked her incredulously. "You realize there are lawn chairs right there?" With this last word, he raised a flipper out to point, which Marlene quickly brought back down.

"We. Cannot. Be. Discovered!" she screamed, trying to get the message through his head. "I thought you were the paranoid one here?"

Skipper rolled his eyes and just took bigger bites out of his corn dog. After about 5 minutes of uncomfortable silence, Marlene said, "You realize it's good that the Humani_ziter_-"

"Humani_fier_."

"-isn't working. These corn dogs we're eating would get us arrested."

"Naive Marlene." was Skipper's reply. "Being arrested is the art of a criminal failing his illegal duty." He paused, examined his corn dog carefully, then asked "Why, are they poisoned?" before pawing his tongue to get any excess poison off.

"Oh, shut up." Marlene said as she gave him a playful punch on the shoulder. "I'm done with my corn dog, where to next?"

Suddenly her eyes lit up as she struggled out of the hole and ran to Miss Fashionable's Boutique.

_**_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *Author's Note* _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _**_

**Okay, so I apologize for giving you guys really short chapters. Hope this one makes up for it? Thank you for reviewing (anon comments are turned on, lurkers!) and each of you gets... A DOLPHIN-SHAPED COOKIE! And please don't tell me they taste fishy. For the last time, they are mammals. ;) Anyhoo, I had a ton of fun with this chappie, but I've never been to Cali before (well, I have, but I was four!) so I'm just working off pictures I've seen and the few memories I have. If any of this is inaccurate, feel free to tell me. And if _Miss Fashionable's Boutique_ is a real place, I'm sorry for using it. Just be glad you got a little extra promotion. =)**


	5. The Sun Goes Down

**AN – I apologize profoundly for lack of update. You know when you know how you want every part in the story to go, but there's one part in it that you need but you can't do and it's slowly killing you? Enter my world.**

* * *

"A boutique."

The animals stood in front of a small store with a frilly pink awning that announced in cursive "BOUTIQUE."

"You realize we're in California. We could go to pretty much any cool tourist attraction and you choose a clothing store."

Marlene rolled her eyes at Skipper's statement. "I wouldn't have come here if I didn't have a reason." She ran into the store and reappeared five seconds later wearing a pair of kid-sized sunglasses. Turning her nose into the air, she struck a variety of modelesque poses, leaving both of them in hysterics.

A few hours and many, many corn dogs later, they sat on the beach together, watching a party slowly die down as the sun followed the same pattern. The fact that neither said anything might seem awkward, but it made perfect sense to them.

Finally it got to an odd point and Skipper finally, in an attempt to make conversation, asked simply, "Can you tell me anything about what it was like here, you know, fifteen or so years ago?"

"Northern Cali, remember?" was her simplistic answer, although she had a faraway look in her eyes. The memories came flooding back.

"What is it?"

Taking a deep sigh, she searched for a good way to begin, finally pointing at a wave gently rolling onto the sand. "It was like that."

* * *

"_Mommy?"_

"_Mommy? Daddy?"_

"_Where are you?"_

_The darkness overwhelmed the young otter's spirit, cutting into her soul like a knife. The crate's size would have felt small to some, but she was so young the empty space felt like the size of an entire universe._

_Before she knew it, the treacherous ride was over and she was at a new place._

"_Hi!"_

"_Hi!"_

"_Hi!"_

"_Hi!"_

"_C'mon guys, get some originality…Hi!"_

_Five young otters faced her. Named Maize, Megan, Mackenzie, Martha, and Madeleine, they greeted her with a Valley Girl too-preppy attitude. They quickly became friends, and were inseparable until she was woken up by the jostling of a crate again._

_Three days she spent at a Denver zoo before going to a DC zoo. A week was there before she was shipped to New York._

* * *

"Whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait." Skipper said hurriedly, snapping her out of her daze. "You were sent to two zoos to go to a third?"

"You guys have been at New York all your life, right?" Deciding not to wait for his answer, she continued, "Because Burt told me they'd been delaying the opening of my habitat for the zoo's 90th anniversary."

"Affirmative… and affirmative." was the reply for both questions before the situation sunk in. "Sweet Mother MacArthur, did you go through a lot!"

"Eh, you get used it to it." Marlene modestly replied. By this time only a glimmer of sun remained in the sky. She quickly recognized the tension in the air, apologizing as she got up and made her way over to a lawn chair. Besides, only a young child flitting around like a butterfly still remained on the beach, she might mistake them for a pair of stuffed animals.

She suddenly turned around to see Skipper's mouth hanging open ever so slightly. She rolled her eyes, figuring he was just zoning off.

In reality, he'd been thinking that she'd never looked better than she had under the California sun.

It may have disappeared under the horizon, but in his eyes it was still there, clear as day.

* * *

**Apologies for short update, long wait. Hope you liked it... Like I said, it was a filler. Next chapter is gonna be the defining one of the story. Hope you liked it!**

**Also - sorry for advertising, but my sister and I have opened a web show on YouTube. Check out our channel (AskUsWebShow) and please comment. Thanks... and again, sorry...**


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